I was in an art supply store trying to figure out what it is I love about them. I don’t paint or sculpt or craft, so there is very little in there for me. I think what I love is the potential. The possibility that if you take home a few of these things you could make something incredible. That will rarely happen, but what’s important is that it could happen. This is the same thing that I love about notebooks. An empty notebook has so much potential. Think of all of the things you love that probably started in notebooks: novels, screenplays, the early sketches for that weird helicopter thing Da Vinci wanted to make. Not one of those things is coming from my notebooks, but maybe something good will. I usually have at least 3 notebooks going at one time. One is for photo-related things (both work and/or art stuff). It is often just a bunch of bad ideas. Here is my current photo notebook and an example of a page full of bad ideas. This is me writing down everything that pops into my head while looking through my photo series Last Night at the Bus Stop, trying to find a new title for it. I then go in and sift through the bad ideas, looking for a good one or two. My favorite bad title is Can Stop Will Stop. That terrible name delights me.
When I was in college I was really into creating “art” in my notebooks. Somebody had given me the Journals of Dan Eldon and pointed me to some Peter Beard books, and I was all in on the mixed media photobook (“This photo is only OK, but what if I wrote on it with blood!?”).
Both of those guys focused mostly on Africa, while I went on 3 long American road trips and two trips to South America. I made a lot of hand-drawn maps. I used a Smith Carona typewriter that I bought at a yard sale. I made my own stamps. I used wax. I shot lots of Polaroids and made Polaroid transfers. I even mailed myself things so the USPS would stamp them. Those notebooks are a mess, but a delightful mess.
I don’t like much of the art I made during those years. It’s all pretty derivative of the artists I loved, trying to shoot like Robert Frank, write like The Beats, and make art like Peter Beard. Despite my current unenthusiastic feelings about my creations, I am glad I made them. It’s as good a record of who I was then as I’ll ever get, even if I can barely relate to who I was then.
A lot of great art started in notebooks but then broke free onto canvases. I never got that far. I wasn’t interested in moving beyond the pages of my notebooks, which is maybe for the best. I think I worked better with the constraints. I think it’s possibly why I love photographing through windows, a real-world constraint that I can’t leave alone
Over time my notebooks became cleaner. I moved away from mixed media and started using them more as a record. I shared an example when writing about the photos I shot on the Staten Island Ferry after college. Here is an example of some pages that include photos cut from a contact sheet of The Ferry, two polaroids from foggy Hollywood, and notes on an assignment I shot in Maine for Time Out New York (in which I was paid $150).
After this, I swung too far the other way and became a little too precious about my presentation. I moved to just photos and hardly any writing at all. I may have been feeling self-conscious about the earlier work.
These days I fall somewhere in the middle. They are almost entirely notes now, with just a few photographs ending up in there. It’s all a lot more practical, mostly just things I need or want to remember and the bad ideas I mentioned.
If you enjoy the notebooks of creative types I’d recommend checking out the Noted Substack. It looks at the notebooks of our heroes. It’s really fun.
A question in closing. Are any of you creating art in notebooks? If so, can I see it?
Can Stop, Will Stop,
Travis
While writing this I was listening to:
I love notebooks, but for me it’s can start will start, but I never do it. As much I fill several pages in a short trip with unimportant random things. No way, I keep two or three of them around as jewels always empty. What I did a lot and keep them is photo dummies, similar to those you show. Maybe I’ll do a post with some of them